Hi,
I'm Josh McDowell, and I'm sure glad you were all able to come out tonight.
And what I want to do is just share briefly on one aspect of truth that I sure
tried to refute.
Kind of the background for what I share here was when I was a student in
university, I ran into some professors and students whose lives were really
different.
And I remember one day I was sitting in the dormitory with them, and I asked them
the question.
I said, what makes your life so differently?
And this one young lady looked at me and just said, Jesus Christ.
And I just laughed.
I thought that was a joke.
And I said, don't give me that garbage.
I'm fed up with religion, the church, the Bible, everything.
And then I couldn't forget that these professors and students right there
challenged me as a pre-law student, now get this, to intellectually to use my
mind to examine the claims of Christ as the Son of God, and the Bible is the Word
of God.
Well, I thought that was a joke.
Because I really thought that most Christians had two brains.
One was lost, and the other was out looking for it.
I really believed that.
But they kept kind of irritating me with it all the time.
And I remember I was at a water fountain, and one of the professors said to me,
what's the matter, young man?
Aren't you willing to be intellectually honest?
That was it.
I said, okay, I'll accept your challenge.
But I didn't do it to prove anything.
I did it to refute them.
And the whole background of my first book, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict,
was to write a book against Christianity.
I figured any fool could do that, and I'd qualify.
And I left the university and traveled throughout the United States, England,
the Middle East, gathering the evidence to write the book, and I had a problem.
When I returned to the university, intellectually, I became convinced that
the Bible was true, and that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.
I'd come to the exact opposite conclusion of what I set out to prove.
And one of the areas that I really knew that if I could refute it, I had my case
won.
And I could look those Christian professors and students right in the eyes
and put them down with a clear conscience.
And that's when it came to the Bible.
I really thought this was a book written years after the time of Christ,
way into the second century, and what people didn't like, they took out.
What they did like, they added to it, and it looked like a mess put together by
a committee.
And I figured an intelligent, rational approach to it would totally satisfy my
mind and refute it.
Was I ever surprised.
And what I'd like to do in our time together is just share with you some of
the things that I found as an individual, as I set out to write my book against the
scriptures, and I ended up not only acknowledging the scriptures as what I
believe now is God's word, but I also ended up becoming a Christian against
everything that I believed.
I believe that most of it is, goes back to thousands of years, but on a whole,
as each generation passed, there are different theories, and they do change the
Bible every time they print it.
No.
What do you base that on?
Why?
Well, interpretation.
I believe that everybody has to have put some of their opinion in it when it was
interpreted.
I don't believe so because there's a lot of different versions that are written,
so it's hard to say probably which one is the true first version.
Every religion itself is written in different versions.
I think that the language that was written has been changed, altered, edited over the
years, so there would be differences.
I just think over time, over the years, the change is like anything else would be
changed.
It's not like playing telephone.
It's all interpreted.
And being that it wasn't written in English, I'm sure, I would only think that
it would be translated basically to suit how people want it to be.
I think it could be different because there's many changes that will be made
that people cannot understand, and different changes that it will go
through over time, that when things change, when the word passes, they pass
differently from time to time.
Well, if I tell you a story today, and you tell that story to someone else,
and then that person tells it to someone else, and it goes and transcends hundreds
and thousands of years, the story isn't the same at the end.
It doesn't equal the same story that was originated.
It doesn't matter.
Um, really, I'm not sure because, you know, I wasn't like born back then,
you know, so, unless it's like some kind of evidence where, you know, it probably
is, it probably isn't, you know.
It could be changed around a lot of times.
I think some of it's the same, but then again, I think some of it's
changed by man over time.
I want to start by contexting the whole set of arguments.
If you're talking to a young person today, say in a high school or university,
and you make a statement that Jesus Christ is a truth, or the Bible is a truth,
or Christianity is a truth, here's a phrase you'll hear.
Well, you know, truth changes all the time.
Oh, I hear that constantly.
Truth changes all the time.
And so, I'll respond, say, really?
Give me an example.
The number one example I hear, straight across, or the high school or
university, is, well, people used to believe that the earth was flat,
now they believe it's round.
I said, that's an example that truth changes?
Well, yes.
I said, let me ask you two questions.
When everybody thought the earth was flat, was it really round?
And I've not had one person this day not say, yes, it was.
Second question, when everybody came to believe the earth was round, had it always
been round?
Well, yes.
Well, then, wait a minute.
Truth didn't change.
Your perspective of truth changed.
The truth remained the same, the earth was round.
Our perspective changed.
And then I'll throw this out.
What caused people to change their perspective from the earth being flat to
the earth being round?
And it's interesting, in almost every single focus group, university or high
school students, they'll say something like this.
Well, the evidence or testimony, experience.
I said, that's right, testimony experience.
Is when people would leave on the ships, the mothers, the wives, the children,
the brothers, sisters, the family would go down to say goodbye to them.
Why?
They truly believed that they would fall off the end of the earth and they would
never see their husband or their father, their kids again.
And they kept going further and further and they kept thinking, they're going to
fall off the edge of the earth.
But they kept going further and further and they kept coming back.
And they said, wait a minute.
The earth must not be flat.
There's no end to the earth.
First was personal testimony and then second, most young people say,
well, the evidence or the facts.
And I'll say, that's right.
They started to examine the evidence.
They started to calculate with the stars and everything.
They said, wait a minute.
The earth isn't flat.
There's a curvature to it.
And then they would sail and they'd come all the way back around and say,
the earth is not flat.
It is round.
It was testimony and the evidence, the facts.
And then I correlate it this way.
You know, I used to believe that the Bible was flat.
Now I believe it's round.
And what changed my opinion?
Two things.
Personal testimony.
Experience.
Second, I examined the evidence.
And what I want to do, because we have a brief period of time, is just examine some
of the evidence.
And it will be a very brief presentation to it.
But in the book that just came out, I spent the last four and a half years
totally rewriting, updating with the evidence and everything, the old two
volumes of Evidence and Demands a Verdict into the new Evidence and Demands a
Verdict.
And everything that I share is completely documented there.
Now in the evidence, whenever you examine any book of history, doesn't matter if
it's the Bible, whatever, any book of antiquity, to determine if it's
historically accurate, authentic, if it has integrity to it, if it's
accurate, you apply an historiography.
And a part of any good historiography, the principles interpreting history,
of studying history, in any good historiography is what's called the
bibliographical test.
And I remember one student spoke up and said, Oh, I knew you'd bring the Bible in.
I said, I didn't say Bible.
Bibliographical test.
Now a bibliographical test will ask two questions of the manuscripts of any work.
Now what is a manuscript?
A manuscript, by definition, is a handwritten copy over against a printed
copy.
A handwritten copy over against a printed copy.
And the question, the first question they ask of a manuscript, now why do they ask
these questions of a manuscript?
Because here is two issues that I struggled with.
Why I needed a historiography, why I needed to study the historical
background of the scriptures.
Because there were two questions that haunted me.
And I think they haunt a lot of people.
The first question was this.
Is what we have today called the Bible, and I'll look at only the New Testament
today, is what we have in the New Testament what was written down 2,000
years ago?
I think that's an honest question.
Or has it been changed?
Like a lot of people say, and use it without documenting, Oh, it's been
changed, what people didn't like they took out, what they did like they put in.
And it just changed down through the years.
So the first question I had to struggle with, is what we have today what was
written down?
Second question though is what even haunted me more.
Was what was written down true?
Because if what was written down wasn't true, I could care less that what we have
today is what was written down.
And so there were two questions that haunted me before I ever became a
Christian.
Truth is really based on facts.
The facts that you can accept to be positive or negative.
It's hard to put a good definition to that.
But I always say that truth would have to have a lot of positives to it.
Like evidence for living.
You make your own truth in that respect.
I think truth is within the person.
And it just naturally evolves.
A person finds their own truth.
If they feel something is right and they feel that they need to find something out,
they will find it.
If they don't really care, then they won't find it out.
It could be discovered and created.
But created, it's a frame of mind that could be passed on or discovered that
someone actually looks for the truth.
I think it's all subjective.
Truth is what it is to you.
Not to what everybody tells you it's worth to me.
So I think it has to be discovered because the truth for you is going to be different
from what it is for other people.
I think in many ways, truth is felt inside.
It's neither discovered nor created.
It's a sense of knowing that something
does exist.
Those facts have to be solid.
Take theorems in geometry.
They're proven with facts.
And to that extent, I think the truth has to have the same kind of basis.
And so this is why I had to examine the manuscripts and the background of the New
Testament.
And so the first question is, what is the timeline between the original,
the autographa, and the closest copy?
You see, the rule of thumb is this.
The closer the copy to the original, usually the greater the accuracy.
That's the rule of thumb.
Now, it's not always true, but the overwhelming majority of the time,
it is true.
But see, that question has a problem behind it.
And the problem was this.
Literature of antiquity was written on material that would perish.
Much of the New Testament manuscript, like a lot of other literature of
antiquity, was written on... it's similar to this here.
It's called papyrus.
And this is made up of the papyrus reed, which is grown in the very shallow waters
of the Nile.
And they'd take these reeds, they would slice them, and then they would place them
crisscross.
If you look carefully here, you could see that.
And then they'd put a glue on it, and then they'd press it together.
And it's amazing.
It really came out to be a very strong paper.
Now, here was a problem.
No matter what they did back then, the material would not last.
It was not durable.
It would start to rot away.
And to show you how sensitive papyrus is...
There was an archaeologist that found a portion of the Gospels in a cave.
And it was on papyrus.
And it had been there for hundreds of years.
But the mistake he made...
When he took it out of the cave, it had been sealed, and certain moisture
had been sealed and everything.
He took it out into the desert, and he held it up to the light to look
like this.
And it disintegrated.
That's why even like the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept behind tinted glass with a
certain temperature and everything, or they disintegrate.
And the reason you don't have originals is all the material would rot away.
And so that's why you have the bibliographical test.
Here you have, say, this is the original, and this is a copy.
How far is the copy removed from the original?
There's many ways to determine the very age of a manuscript.
One, probably the best way is the type of material that it's written on,
and its age.
For example, if it's written on parchment, or pottery, or the skin of animals,
or from papyrus, which I already described.
In studying that material, you can pretty well determine within a few years of when
that manuscript was done, or that portion of a manuscript.
Another way is by the division of the text.
See, a lot of people don't realize that originally the text was not divided the
way that we have it in the Bible today.
Over the years, they would divide the text, or even begin or end the verse at a
different place.
And so by studying the division of the text, you can narrow it down to a few
years when a manuscript was done.
And then, have you ever picked up an old book, and you're looking at the beginning,
and maybe the first letter is kind of ornate or artistic.
Or there'll be a picture there, a drawing, a graphic.
And by studying those, in the manuscripts, they did the same thing.
And by studying those, you can pretty well determine in a close proximity the years
in which a manuscript was done.
This morning at my home, I had a friend over, and I said, look what I found.
It was a book, handwritten back 1,500, almost 500 years ago.
And as I opened it up, he says, oh, look at the drawing.
And see, it's that drawing that often you can determine the age.
Those are just a few ways to determine how old a manuscript is.
Now, one thing that I've learned over the years, the more I compare the scriptures
with other literature of antiquity, the greater appreciation I have of the
scriptures in comparison.
For example, with Pliny the Younger, known as Pliny Segundus, from the time he
wrote to the closest manuscript, everything else rotted away and lost,
750 years.
With Caesar, wrote his Gallic Wars in the first century.
From the time Caesar wrote to the closest manuscript, 1,000 years from the time he
wrote.
With Plato, from the time he wrote to the closest manuscript, 1,200 years.
Aristotle wrote his Poetics around 343 B .C.
The closest manuscript is 1100 A.D., 1,400 years later.
Everything in between has been lost.
Sophocles, 1,400 years.
Euripides, 1,500 years.
But when it comes to the New Testament, just the New Testament, we now go back
within about 50 to 70 to 75 years.
And now with some of the new discoveries, they're saying, even taking it all the way
back to the 50s and the early 60s, which would be within 20 to 30,
35 years.
You have the John Ryland papyri, a small portion found in a cave in Egypt
that was preserved over all the years, about 125 A.D., within 80 years.
Then you have the Papyri Bodmer.
Now, why is it called papyri?
It's written on papyrus.
The Papyri Bodmer II, right around 155 A .D.
And then you have the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrus.
So they sound like diseases.
Well, these are titles given to some complete copies of the New Testament.
Just time-wise, there is more evidence in the manuscripts, time-wise, for the New
Testament than any ten pieces of classical literature combined.
And then, with the second question, the first is the timeline.
The second question is very critical.
And that's this one.
How many manuscripts do you have?
See, what do you mean?
Well, the greater numbers...
See, this is the original, and here's the copies.
The greater number of the copies that you have, the easier it is to reconstruct the
original, the autographa, and check out any errors or discrepancies.
One of the complaints is, well, you don't have the originals.
Well, of course you don't have the originals.
Jesus walked and lived on the face of the earth 2,000 years ago.
And back then they didn't have the papers I've already described that they have
today.
But it's not whether you have the originals or not, but do you have the
copies where you can recreate the originals?
And this is what I was talking about, that we do have the copies.
We do have the material.
To me, it totally satisfies my mind that we are able to recreate the original.
In fact, you take the Nestle's New Testament Greek.
It's probably about half the size of my Bible here, and thicker.
And any question and doubt that what we have today was not the original...
Now, think of this.
In the Greek, Nestle's New Testament is less than one half of one page.
Now, when that comes to a literature of antiquity, that's miraculous.
That's phenomenal.
And so the issue is not whether do you have the originals.
I mean, at that time, nobody has the originals.
The question is, is there sufficient manuscripts to recreate the autographa,
the original?
And with the New Testament, I say, yes, we do.
Now, in comparing with secular literature.
For example, Caesar and the Gallic Wars.
Ten manuscripts.
But nobody in the university questions that Caesar fought the Gallic Wars.
And for a long time, he was the only one that ever survived that wrote about it.
A thousand years, the closest manuscript after he died, and there's only ten
manuscripts.
Of Plato, seven manuscripts.
Of Tacitus, the Roman historian.
Right now, there's less than twenty manuscripts that have ever survived.
And then Thucydides.
Many people consider Thucydides one of the most accurate historians of antiquity.
And yet, there's only seven manuscripts.
And those are a thousand, three hundred years after Thucydides died.
Herodotus is eight manuscripts in about a thousand, four hundred years.
With Pliny the Younger, there's about seven manuscripts.
With Sophocles, a hundred and ninety-three, which is one of the most.
Euripides, nine.
The men and women.
Aristotle, there were thirteen.
Now it's up to forty-nine they've discovered.
Well, with the New Testament, just the New Testament, and the new evidence that
demands a verdict, I have now been able to document twenty-four thousand,
six hundred and thirty-three manuscripts.
Of just the New Testament.
I never even knew they existed.
Until I set out to make a joke of it.
And later, I found out the joke was on me.
I had not done my homework.
Now let me show you how unique that twenty-four thousand, six hundred and
thirty-three is.
Is there any of you here that know the number two book in manuscript authority in
all of history?
The New Testament's number one.
Any of you know the number two book in all history in manuscript authority?
The Iliad by Homer.
Six hundred and forty-three manuscripts.
That's number two in all history.
And yet it's interesting, to this day, I've yet to find a teacher or a professor
that knew that.
I didn't even know it until I set out to make a joke of it.
Just number-wise, there is more evidence to examine than any ten pieces of
classical and literature of antiquity put together.
But no, you can do this.
Take every Bible and destroy it.
Take every manuscript and burn it.
Destroy every manuscript.
Destroy every Bible.
And within a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty, three hundred years of
Christ, closer than any other literature of antiquity, I can reconstruct all but
eleven verses of the entire New Testament.
You say, now wait a minute, without any manuscripts?
Without anybody?
Yeah.
Throw them all away and burn them.
And I can go back within a hundred and fifty to three hundred years and
reconstruct.
Say, how do you do that?
I discovered that the early church fathers, when they would write letters to
the churches, or they would give sermons, they would write out and copy quotes out
of the scriptures.
Well, just like I do.
I will copy sometimes a half chapter out through my notes.
And they have sometimes, they would copy three, four, five chapters of the
scriptures in corresponding with the churches.
And I've now been able to document 86,429 quotations from just the early church
fathers.
And taking these 86,429 quotations, you can, without any Bible manuscript or
anything, you can reconstruct all but eleven verses.
But I never knew that until I set out to make a joke of it.
And I found out later, boy, the joke was on me.
That even to recreate much of the original, you don't even have to have a
Bible or a transcript.
And that is mind-blowing to me.
And so, time-wise and number-wise, the Bible stands alone.
Now, it doesn't mean it's true.
But I think it does mean this, that what we have today is what was
written down.
Whether what was written down was true or not, but it is what was written down.
Now, the second question.
Was what was written down true?
Did Jesus do that?
Did he say this?
Is this a true rendering of what Christ said and what he did?
I would say parts of it.
Again, I think it's all based on what had happened.
But I don't know if it's actually word for word exactly what went on.
I think it's just somebody's telling a story.
It could be changed at any time, from history to even fiction, like
make-believe.
It could be any one of those that they choose.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
How does one define or ascertain whether something written over the course of
centuries is in fact what was intended to be written from the onset?
I mean, I know for me, if I read the Bible, I follow it how I interpret it.
So, if I think something about it is right, then I'm not going to follow that
part of it.
There are several lines of argument that I want to share along that.
The first is the writers of the New Testament.
They wrote as eyewitnesses or they recorded eyewitness accounts.
You say, what?
They wrote as eyewitnesses or, like Luke, they recorded eyewitness
accounts.
I believe Matthew, Mark, and John are eyewitnesses.
Luke is not.
Luke recorded eyewitness accounts for Theophilus.
And see, what they did in those days is often a man would hire a scribe,
a scholar, a researcher to research out, just like people do today.
And it looks like Theophilus had hired Luke to study everything carefully that
had happened.
And Luke starts out his gospel by saying, I have examined everything carefully from
the beginning from those who are eyewitnesses to present to you the exact
truth of the things taught among us.
So, Luke did not write as an eyewitness, but he did record eyewitness accounts.
One of the most critical tests for me is the eyewitness.
I mean, here in the New Testament time, the community was the most powerful force
to determine truth.
Because, you see, there were so many people alive who knew Jesus when this was
all recorded and written.
They knew what he said, they knew where he went, what he did.
And if they would have ever dared to have added or to have taken away, there were
antagonistic people right there at that time to correct them.
And then also, coming, you know, to the book of Mark, a lot of people say,
well, you can't consider Mark an eyewitness, even though he recorded
eyewitness accounts.
And they said, but Mark wasn't an eyewitness when he wrote the gospel of
Mark.
He recorded what Peter said.
And there are secular sources, apart from the Bible, that would confirm
that Mark was the recorder of what Peter said.
And see, that was done all the time in olden days.
And even like now is in the olden days, they would often have a writer,
a scribe, a recorder that would take down the person's memory and what he shared.
And then that would become his work.
But recently a book came out on eyewitness to Jesus, and it was written by an
attorney.
And she clearly documented, according to the laws of legal evidence, that Mark
would be considered an eyewitness account because he had recorded.
He was simply the recorder of the eyewitness, which was Peter.
And so the eyewitness is a powerful determinant of truth.
For example, in 1 John 1.3, in the New Testament, the apostle John says,
What our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, what our hands have handled,
we declare unto you about Jesus Christ.
Well, you can't get much closer to this situation.
And then in 2 Peter 1.16, Peter is talking to the Jewish audience.
And he said, We do not follow cleverly devised tales.
You know, it's interesting today, how many people will say to me,
and many of them are very sincere, they'll say, you know, back then they
couldn't discern the difference between tales and truth.
They couldn't discern the difference between fact and fiction.
Well, let me tell you, I'll stand, I'll put any of them up against any
professor today or any historian today.
They knew the difference between truth and tales.
They went out and died for it.
And Peter starts out here and says, We did not follow cleverly devised tales.
They knew the difference between tales and truth and fact and fiction.
But we were eyewitnesses.
We were eyewitnesses.
They wrote as eyewitnesses.
And then in John 20, verses 30 to 31, John says, Many other things, many other
signs Jesus performed.
Now, why did he do signs?
He did signs to convince people that he was from the Father, that he was the
Messiah, the Son of God.
And it says, Many other signs Jesus did that convinced people then that he was the
Messiah.
And John writes, They have not even been recorded.
But then the next verse says, But these things have been written, In other words,
these signs have been recorded that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ and
in believing, have eternal life.
I don't think it would be, it's a matter of proving something.
I think it's a matter of believing and feeling.
That's what I feel.
I learned to live this way.
And I actually, I have questioned that.
That it would be difficult to prove in a court of law.
It would be difficult to prove.
I would say it would go with any religion that it cannot, that it couldn't be proven
through law force.
There is too many variables there, depending on who the judges are,
the jury is.
It's impossible to put a label to that.
This is where I get the phrase that I like to use.
The evidence for Christianity is not exhaustive, but it's sufficient.
And you say, What do you mean?
Well, in verse 30, the apostle John writes out, he says it's not exhaustive.
Many of the signs Jesus did haven't even been recorded.
So it's not exhaustive.
But he said, these that had been recorded of what Christ did and said, are that you
might have life and have eternal life in him.
So he said it is sufficient for an intelligent belief.
So the evidence is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient.
They wrote as eyewitnesses.
And in Luke, when he starts out the book of Acts, in the first three verses,
he said that Christ had appeared to the apostles with many convincing proofs over
a period of 40 days.
And that phrase, convincing proofs, was a phrase of that day of overwhelming
evidence in a court of law.
And so he says there, look, I'm not an eyewitness.
But in examining the eyewitness, they recorded that they lived with Christ,
they ate with him, everything, for 40 days after the resurrection.
So he recorded an eyewitness account.
Now, there's a second part of the writers of the scriptures.
They not only wrote as eyewitnesses or recorded eyewitness accounts, but here is
a critical key.
In the presence of some of the most adamant, some of the most hostile
witnesses, people that disagreed with him, people who knew Jesus, they knew what he
said, knew what he did.
Hostile witnesses.
They presented this in the presence of hostile, knowledgeable witnesses and said,
you know what we're talking about.
They not only said, we saw these things, but in front of knowledgeable witnesses,
they threw it back in their lap and said, you know what I'm talking about.
For example, here again we'll go back to Peter.
In Acts 2.22, he is before a very antagonistic Jewish audience.
They really thought that the disciples and the apostles were presenting a false
Messiah.
And any sincere Jew would have to stand against that.
Strongly stand against that.
And so they did.
So here is Peter before this antagonistic audience.
And notice what he does.
This here is one of the best preservers of truth.
He said, men of Israel, listen to these words.
Jesus the Nazarene.
And notice what he says.
A man attested to you.
In other words, not just to us.
He is standing in front of these hostile people and say, look.
He was attested to you with miracles and wonders in science, which God performed
through him in your midst just as you yourselves know.
Well, I'll tell you this.
If that antagonistic Jewish audience had not seen those miracles and those wonders
and science, literally everything that Peter would have said would have been
discounted and thrown out.
And he would have probably been lucky to make it out of there alive.
But what does history show this happened?
Thousands were added to the church.
You see, it was presented in the presence of knowledgeable people.
Where if they would have dared to depart from the truth, the very community itself
would have corrected it.
They appealed to the knowledge of their opponents.
And I know when I go into a debate, and over the years I probably had close to
200 to 250 debates, and I studied my opponent's position more than I do my own.
I know what I believe.
I know why I believe it.
I got to find out why does my opponent believe what he or she believes.
And so, when I go into a debate, I would constantly turn to my opponent on
some point and say, Isn't this true?
Or, you know what I'm talking about.
Boy, you better be accurate when you do that or you'll be shoved right back down
your throat.
And you can be right 19 times, miss it once, and if your opponent is
sharp, he or she will step up and bury you that one time that you missed the mark,
not the 19 times you nailed it.
And so the community became a powerful corrector of falsehood.
And a lot of people don't realize that.
You have in Acts 26, and starting with verse, say, 20 and 22.
Here is Paul brought before the king.
And he'd argue a little bit on the deity of Christ, the resurrection, and the king
says, Paul, your great learning is driving you mad.
Well, they knew Paul had great learning.
He was brilliant.
And he said, your great learning is driving you mad.
And Paul responded to the king.
He said, I am speaking to you of words of truth and rationale.
For this has not been done.
Notice what he did now.
This has not been done in the corner, for the king knows about these matters.
What did Paul do?
He took the whole argument, threw it back on the king's lap, and said, this was not
done in the corner.
You know what I'm talking about.
Well, boy, when you do that, you better be accurate, or you have totally lost your
audience.
And yet that's what the apostle Paul did.
They wrote as eyewitnesses, or recorded eyewitness accounts.
Second, they appealed to the knowledge of the readers and listeners concerning the
evidence that they spoke about.
And so I believe that what we have here is literally what Jesus said and what Jesus
did.
I believe what was written down was true of what Christ said and did.
Because they wouldn't have dared to have departed.
The community was there.
Even the apostle Paul said, in 1 Corinthians 15, he said, and Christ
appeared to over 500 people at one time.
And notice what he says.
He said, the majority of them are alive right now.
I mean, wow.
If he didn't appear to 500 people and the majority are alive right now, Paul was
saying, go check it out yourself.
He would have been buried.
Instead of being killed by the Jewish leaders, the church would have probably
killed him for doing that.
I'm speaking rather facetiously here.
But he appealed to the knowledge.
And then there's two issues that come up with the apostles.
Then I believe comes to relating that what was written down was true.
Not only do we have what was written down, but what was written down was true about
what Jesus said and what Jesus did.
Here you have the apostles, the followers, the intimate followers of Christ.
I think you could be fairly accurate in saying 11 of the 12 died martyrs' deaths.
You could be very accurate in saying 10 of the 12.
I'll say 11 of the 12.
11 of the 12 died martyrs' deaths.
The other died in exile, John.
But what did they die for?
Look, you read the book of Acts.
You go back to the early church and the early church fathers.
They died for one thing, an empty tomb and the appearance of a man by the name of
Jesus of Nazareth.
And in their own words they said, for 40 days we lived with him,
we ate with him after the resurrection with many convincing proofs.
And 11 of the 12 died some of the most heinous deaths in history.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf, the man who you might say put Harvard Law School in the map,
wrote the three great volumes in the Laws of Legal Evidence, the Royal Professor of
Law, and in studying military history he made this statement.
There is no equal to what the apostles went through and never once denied that
Christ had been raised from the dead and they had seen him and lived with him for
40 days.
Not one of them in the greatest persecution ever denied that and torture.
He said in the annals of military warfare there is no equal.
I mean you go back a number of years and look at Watergate.
Nobody was threatened with death or anything, the death penalty or anything
else.
And yet they couldn't even keep a secret for more than a few days.
And one after another started breaking.
And yet here were men that were persecuted, they were tortured.
And they never once denied that after he was crucified and buried for 40 days,
they lived with him and ate with him.
Now here are two legitimate questions that appeal to that.
The first is this, you could honestly say, well, a lot of people have died for a lie.
And that's true.
A lot of people have died for a lie.
I mean you could go back through history and see people that have died for lies
later found out was a lie.
And so they see, what's the big deal?
Well, here's the issue when it comes to the apostles.
Yes, I will grant it.
A lot of people have died for a lie, but they thought it was the truth.
They thought it was the truth.
Now here's a catch.
If the resurrection did not take place, and that for 40 days these 12 men had not
lived with Christ, eaten with Christ everywhere for 40 days, then they had to
know it was a lie.
And here's the catch.
Yes, a lot of people have died for a lie, but they thought it was the truth.
If the apostles died for a lie, through the torture and everything they
went, they had to know it was a lie.
I trust them more than most people I've ever studied in history.
They went through the test of death to determine their veracity.
Tertullian put it this way.
They signed their testimony in blood.
I'd have to answer more so the negative side, but I would say it's the feeling of
these scholars and clergymen that put their words into it.
In your opinion?
In my honest opinion?
Yeah.
I think some of it can be taken as words of God, but I don't think God wrote it
himself.
Maybe the disciples or people that were strong believers in him, but I don't think
he actually hand-wrote it himself.
I don't know.
I don't really have an answer for that.
I've not thought about that.
I don't either.
I think that's what everybody's trying to find out.
And maybe we'll never know.
I believe it's the word of those that wrote it.
And as they perceive directly or indirectly what the word of God would have
been, was, or should have been.
Maybe some of you have heard the name.
A lot of people have.
Andre Cole.
That's his stage name.
His real name is Bob Gertler.
He's referred to as the world's greatest illusionist.
He trained many of the other illusionists and names you know.
He has created, now think, one mind has created and sold over 2,000 illusionary
and magical effects.
All out of one mind.
The disappearing of the 747, Statue of Liberty, everything.
I mean, I've stood a little further from here to say those lights right there,
when he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
And I've seen it three times.
And I remember I said to Andre, how'd you do that?
And he said, very well.
And this guy's phenomenal.
And he's referred to as the magician's magician.
That's his title.
He didn't give himself, the other magicians gave it.
And he's the only man who can boast, from what I understand, that he's never
been fooled by another illusionist.
Well, he graduated from UCLA.
And he was challenged to take his expertise as the world's greatest
illusionist, a man who can boast he's never been fooled by another illusionist.
And to apply his skills to the miracles of Jesus Christ to explain them away as
illusion and magic.
He thought that would be an easy task.
In fact, I thought that was a pretty good challenge to do that.
I wish I'd thought of that.
And since he thought it'd be so easy, he accepted it.
In the process, he became a Christian.
And I was with him up in Vancouver, British Columbia a number of years ago.
And he started to share with me his testimony, what brought him to Christ.
And how he was challenged to take modern illusion and magic and refute the miracles
of Christ.
And he gave me some of the principles of illusion.
For example, almost all illusions are done indoors.
Why?
You've got to control the environment.
Almost all of Christ's miracles were done outdoors.
Which many illusionists would never dream of doing.
And in the process, he said he was able to explain away some of the miracles.
But he said when it came to several, he couldn't.
He said the main one was the resurrection.
He said, Josh, in using all the modern magic, illusion and everything,
there is no way in all our knowledge today that he could have deceived his followers.
He said, Josh, you've got to understand, to do some of the illusions today,
you have an 18-wheeler semi-load of just equipment to do one illusion.
He said, Jesus had none of that.
And he did most of them outdoors.
Even the resurrection took place outdoors.
And he said, I could not refute it.
And it's one of the things that brought Andre Cole to Christ.
And he said, if the resurrection was a lie, these men had to know it.
So, yes, a lot of people have died for a lie, but they thought it was the truth.
But if the resurrection is a lie, then these 12 men had to know it was a
lie.
And they not only died for a lie, but they knew it was a lie.
It would be mighty hard to find an equal to that in all of history.
But the second argument, or the second line of reasoning here, were the apostles.
And this is one of the stronger ones to me.
When you say that here were 12 men, 11 of the 12 died martyrs, deaths,
for one thing, an empty tomb, the appearances of man by the name of Jesus in
Nazareth.
And I think a very fair accusation is, well, a lot of people have died for a
great cause.
And you know, that accusation is true.
There are a lot of people that have died for a great cause.
I remember I was out in San Diego during the Vietnam War, where this fellow ran
out, set himself on fire, and died.
He killed himself over Vietnam.
What the newspapers didn't bring out, from what I understand, is that his
roommate had a fire extinguisher, but it didn't work.
He really didn't plan on dying, but he ended up dying because the fire
extinguisher didn't work.
But in all of history, you can trace back and find many people who have died for a
great cause.
So they say, see Josh, the apostles knew it was a great cause, and they were
willing to lie and die for it.
I say, wait a minute, this is where that breaks down.
Their great cause died on the cross.
You say, now what do you mean?
To understand that, you have to go back in history some.
And I document this in my book called More Than a Carpenter.
And I document it from Jewish sources.
A lot of people have died for a great cause, but their great cause died on the
cross.
And if that was their great cause, you have to explain what happened in their
lives afterwards.
And they became martyrs and faced all that torture for a cause that died on the
cross.
You see, you go way back before the time of Christ.
And the hierarchy of Judaism taught, and I've got this all documented in the
book More Than a Carpenter.
They taught that there were going to be two messiahs coming.
Two messiahs, once each.
One would be the suffering messiah, the son of Joseph.
Who would come and suffer for the sins of Israel.
The other would be the reigning political messiah, who would come and take Israel
out of bondage.
And take them off into the millennium.
And you say, well, how did they get that?
Well, see, when Jesus came onto the scene, Jesus was probably the most unlike person
to his times.
That's why people couldn't understand him.
Jews from childhood up taught there were going to be two messiahs coming once each.
Jesus said, no, there's one messiah coming twice.
He said, I'm coming first to suffer, then I'm coming back a second time to
reign politically.
And to rule the world.
Now, how did they get this?
Well, as you read the Old Testament, one verse is talking about a reigning
political messiah.
The other verse is talking about a suffering messiah.
The next verse is a reigning political messiah suffering.
One chapter would be about a reigning messiah, another chapter the suffering.
So they said, well, there must be two messiahs coming once each.
Jesus said, no, there's one messiah coming twice.
But when the Romans had taken captive of Israel and brought them under as slaves in
servitude, the Jewish hierarchy was having a hard time holding the allegiance of the
people.
Because it was hard to hold the allegiance of people saying, well, the messiah is
going to come and have hope, but he's going to die.
I mean, that doesn't hold any allegiance.
So they said, look, we are the messiah.
Israel is a messiah, we have suffered.
And boy, if any people have suffered, it is the Jewish people.
It is the nation of Israel, all down through history have suffered.
And they said, look, we are the suffering messiah.
We have suffered so much, we have taken the sins of the world upon ourselves,
and God has punished us for the sins of the world.
So we don't need a suffering messiah, we are the suffering messiah.
So they started to ingrain in young people from childhood up, when the messiah comes,
he will be a reigning political messiah.
And you see this in the conversation of the disciples.
Did you ever wonder why it was so hard for them to understand what Jesus taught?
For example, Lord, is it now that you are going to set up your kingdom?
Were they thinking of a suffering messiah who is going to go across and be crucified
and buried?
No!
They were thinking of a reigning political messiah that every Jewish young lad had
ingrained into their hearts and minds.
Lord, can we reign in your right hand?
Are they thinking of a suffering messiah?
No.
You see, the disciples really thought they were in on a good thing.
They really did.
They thought they were going to rule over everyone.
And they were going to rule right away.
And this is why they couldn't understand Jesus.
He kept saying, I've got to go to Jerusalem.
I'm going to be crucified and buried.
But on the third day I'll be raising the dead.
That was so foreign to their way of thinking.
And what happened was, they would say, no Lord, you can't.
Don't go there.
And they tried to protect him.
He said, you don't understand.
I've got to do the will of the Father.
I've got to go and I'm going to be crucified and buried.
Well, a Jewish young person had no concept of the messiah dying.
And this is why when Christ went there and he got crucified and buried, they were
totally discouraged.
I mean, their heart had been cut out.
And they just went and hid themselves, many in their own homes, totally
despondent.
I mean, did you ever think why they were so despondent?
If they knew he was going to be raising the dead.
They had no inkling that he was going to be raising the dead.
They couldn't understand that.
And this is why it was so hard for them afterwards.
They weren't believers.
They didn't instantly believe in the resurrection.
Even Thomas said, I'm not going to believe unless I put my finger in his wounds.
Now, I can identify with Thomas.
And Jesus said, stretch forth your finger.
See, they were convinced beyond what they'd been taught their whole lifetime.
Yes, a lot of people have died for a great cause.
But their great cause died on the cross.
What happened?
I struggle with this.
What happened that literally changed their lives?
For me, I am convinced that what we have here in the Bible is not only what was
written down 2,000 years ago.
But what was written down was true.
This is what Jesus said and what Jesus did.
And I would stake the lives of the apostles on that.
They went through the test of death to determine their veracity.
So I can hold this book in my hands.
And I am convinced I can trust it.
It is God's Word.
And it's a rendering of God's heart and mind and His truth about each one of us
and our relationship with Him.
It is the Word of God.
I can trust it.
You are the reason.
You are the kingdom.
You are the truth.
I cannot get past the evidence for you.
I can't get past the evidence.